Curated category
Fusional languages
- Irish languagePrimitive Irish inscriptions from the 4th century AD mark the earliest written evidence of this Celtic language. These carvings appear throughout Ireland and…
- Danish languageThe Viking Age left a mark on the English countryside that still echoes today. In Yorkshire, place names like Selby and Whitby end with -by, a suffix meaning…
- Norwegian languageThe Hole Runestone, carved between 1 and 250 CE, bears the inscription idiberug/n. This artifact stands as the oldest known writing in Norway and across all…
- German languageThe High German consonant shift began during the Migration Period, separating Old High German dialects from Old Saxon. This sound change altered the…
- Italian languageThe Veronese Riddle dates to the 8th or early 9th century and stands as one of the earliest surviving texts that can be called vernacular.
- Portuguese languageIn 216 BC, Roman soldiers and merchants arrived in the Iberian Peninsula. They brought Latin with them to a land already home to Celtic tribes like the…
- French languageIn the late eighth century, a distinct awareness of a vernacular language emerged in Gaul, separate from Latin. The Oaths of Strasbourg and the Sequence of…
- Slavic languagesThe Slavic languages descend from a proto-language called Proto-Slavic, which was spoken during the Early Middle Ages. This language itself evolved from an…
- HindiThe word Hindi traces back to Old Persian, which derived the name from Sanskrit Sindhu, referring to the Indus River. Early inhabitants of the Indo-Gangetic…
- Spanish languageThe name Spanish derives from the Kingdom of Castile, a historical region in north-central Spain. The term Castile itself likely comes from the word for…
- ArabicIn 125 CE, a man named Garm(')allāhe carved three lines of poetry into stone at En Avdat in Israel. This inscription stands as the earliest continuous Arabic…
- LatinThe earliest known form of Latin is Old Latin, also called Archaic or Early Latin. It was spoken from the Roman Kingdom, traditionally founded in 753 BC…
- English languageIn the 5th century, Germanic tribes known as Angles, Saxons, and Jutes crossed the North Sea to settle in Britain. These people spoke dialects that would…
- Coptic languageThe earliest attempts to write the Egyptian language using Greek letters date back to the Ptolemaic Kingdom. Scholars refer to this phase as Pre-Coptic…
- Greek languageA clay tablet discovered in Messenia dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC. This artifact contains the earliest written evidence of Greek language.